The Season at Sarsaparilla

A charade of suburbia

Patrick White

• Publisher: Currency Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781760626730
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

Patrick White's classic 1965 drama The Season at Sarsaparilla is 'a charade of suburbia', a play of shadows, rather than substance.%##CHAR13##%%##CHAR13##%The neighbours that populate the play are held by their environment, waiting with determination, but little expectation, for the inevitable cycle of birth, copulation and death.

ACT ONE

When the lights go up on the three homes in Mildred Street, there is an outburst of barking as from a pack of dogs somewhere in the distance. PIPPY POGSON appears in the kitchen from one of the invisible rooms of the Pogson home, centre stage. A forthright and astute small girl. She runs through the kitchen, very determined, opens the invisible back door, pauses for a moment, looking and listening. She runs down the steps into the yard. Coming forward, she pulls open an invisible back gate. She is perhaps out to investigate the barking dogs. She stands at the gate (i.e. at the footlights) listening, shading her eyes, looking up and down the lane. GIRLIE POGSON, her mother, is heard calling from the front part of her house.

GIRLIE: [offstage, calling] Pip-py … ?! Pip-py?!

PIPPY scowls. She explodes under her breath, then runs and hides under the house. The barking continues spasmodically, gradually dying. GIRLIE POGSON enters her kitchen. A small, spruce woman in her forties. Not a hair out of place, and never will be. Everything must be nice, even if you pay the price. MRS POGSON wears all the marks of anxiety and a respectable social level.

[Calling, quite viciously by now, as she looks out of the back door] Joy-leen!

She returns in despair into the kitchen.

It’s the holidays. It’s the holidays. Always like this in the holidays. And now those dogs! It shouldn’t be allowed.

Glancing at herself in a wall-mirror in passing, she corrects a hair, touches her frown, sighs. She goes out the back of the kitchen into the front part of her house. At the same time DEEDREE enters from the front garden. Slightly younger than her friend PIPPY, more innocent, easily put upon. DEEDREE is the eternal stooge. She is carrying two milk bottles, a loaf and a newspaper.

DEEDREE: [calling, tentatively] Pip-py? Pip-py? Where are yer?

PIPPY sticks her head out from under the house.

PIPPY: [scowling] I’m here. Gee, you’re early, Deedree. Didn’t you have your breakfast? Mum won’t give you any if you haven’t.

DEEDREE: ’Course I had me breakfast. Didn’t you?

PIPPY: [angrily] No. Yes!

She comes out from under the house.

I wasn’t hungry. But I had some to keep her quiet.

DEEDREE: Is she going crook?

PIPPY: Always.

DEEDREE: What about?

PIPPY: Oh, everything.

DEEDREE just stands.

Says I know too much.

DEEDREE: [devotedly] You do know an awful lot, Pippy.

PIPPY: Well, I can’t help that. It just comes to me.

During the foregoing, GIRLIE POGSON re-enters her kitchen, starting (in mime) to get the next round of breakfast.

DEEDREE: Monica Jeffreys is gunna read through the dictionary.

PIPPY: [contemptuously] Monica Jeffreys! Sooky thing!

DEEDREE: She’s got as far as B.

PIPPY: I don’t have to read the dictionary.

DEEDREE: [indicating the loaf, milk and paper which she is carrying] What am I gunna do with these, Pippy?

PIPPY: [jerking her head at the kitchen] Give them to her. It’ll sweeten her up.

DEEDREE: [doubtfully] Ah!

GIRLIE: [calling back into the hous...